Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old college student, offered Elon Musk $5,000 to stop tracking his private jet. Sweeney then opened up about his reasons for rejecting Musk's offer.
As is known, Protocol first reported that Sweeney was the person behind the Twitter account @ElonJet which tracked the movements of Musk's private plane. For security reasons, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the Twitter account.
In an interview with Business Insider, Sweeney revealed more about his conversation with Musk in a Twitter DM. To Musk, Sweeney explained how to track his private plane and made suggestions to make his plane more difficult to track.
"What about $5k for this account and generally helping make it harder for crazy people to track me down?" Musk asked Sweeney via DM, as quoted from Business Insider, Monday (31/1/2022).
Sweeney replied: "Looks like it can be done, my account and all the help. Can it be raised to $50k?"
After only being offered $5,000, Sweeney said the money wasn't enough because he had put a lot of effort into creating the Twitter account. Sweeney said the $50,000 would be used to pay for his college tuition, as well as to buy a Tesla 3 car.
After Sweeney raised his bid to $50,000, Musk said he would consider his new offer. But until now the two have not had a deal, so Sweeney decided to reveal his conversation with Musk to the public.
Sweeney first opened the @ElonJet account in June 2020. The account uses bots to retrieve publicly available air traffic data.
Sweeney said he had been developing the technology behind the account for several months before the account was launched. He admitted that he got the idea because he had been a Musk fan for a long time.
"I knew he owned a jet, and I knew it would reveal what business he was in and where he was going and stuff," Sweeney said.
Sweeney said Musk appeared to have followed his advice to make his private planes more difficult to track using a blocking system that changed the plane's identifier. But Sweeney is still looking for a way to track the plane belonging to the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.